Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor Page A

crept out of his room to see his parents dancing drunkenly, his mother’s arms around his father, her cigarette burning in her fingers, crying as he carefully patted her head.
    In fall, the mothers and children all returned to the city, and there were family dinners, cocktails with neighbours. Harry was reunited with his friends and went back to the familiar rhythms of school. They burned the autumn leaves as a pagan ritual. His father disappeared into work.
    He went back inside, where his mother was setting out two plates of Argentine short ribs on a bed of spiced wild rice.
    “Mother, Erin and I are a little concerned.” This wasn’t true. As far as Harry knew, Erin wasn’t concerned about anything. “You’ve basically renounced your life.”
    “Harold, you come to the end of things. Love, money, sex. It dissipates over time.”
    “You’re still active. You’re still attractive to men.”
    “I’m still attractive to precisely the kind of men I don’t want anything to do with. Old men who need a nursemaid, witless retirees who want a companion, entrenched old roosters who have seventy years of dull stories waiting.”
    His mother’s ruthlessness extended to herself. She wasn’t one of those people who sit deluded in their apartment, hoping for salvation, carefully retouching their highlights in casethey met someone in the supermarket. She had calibrated her future precisely and would take steps to occupy it with as much grace and interest as she could muster.
    Harry remembered that she and Dale had once gone to New York for a weekend with a few other couples. Erin and Harry had been left with someone. Back then, you could leave your children with anyone. His parents went to see Ella Fitzgerald at Radio City Music Hall. Afterward they all went to the Plaza and drank martinis. Nat King Cole was sitting nearby and they didn’t register his presence, they took him in stride. It was this fact that came up repeatedly when his parents told the story of that weekend. We didn’t even notice him. And it was this casual proximity that made them feel that they were part of something.
    But the whole city had shifted beneath their feet, subtly moving away from them. He remembered when he would see neighbours in the society page of the paper. Now there was only beauty and celebrity. No one recognized money anymore.
    “Eventually you find yourself on the edges,” Felicia said. She drained the last drop of her martini and poured a little of the Malbec into her wineglass. “There is no defense against being marginalized. Perhaps talent, but so few have it. Money isn’t much help. Not as much as people think, anyway.”
    Harry wondered if his mother was marginalizing herself before she could become marginalized, her need for control.
    “Harold, there’s something I need to tell you. Your grandfather, as you already know, was a force. He gave away, I don’t know how much land—all that land where the hospital sits. He donated land to the university, to the Anglican church. He fell in love with giving. It became his mistress, I think. One of them, anyway. His fortune was impregnable. Certainly that is what we thought when he died. My brothers and I. Philip hired his own lawyer, you know. Frightened that Prentice andI would somehow conspire to disinherit him. How could we? In any event, there wasn’t much to disinherit. He left me that house. My mother didn’t want it. I was a woman, vulnerable, he thought. I would need shelter at some point. The money went to my brothers. They each got something like half a million dollars. Not an insignificant sum in those days, though a fraction of what they expected.”
    Harry remembered his grandfather dimly. Occasionally they all went to dinner at Barton’s house, seated at the oversized table, his grandparents at each end. His grandmother, a small, faded woman in an antique dress, silent and attentive, still carrying the nineteenth century within her, slowly disappearing, like